What counts as knowledge?

What this prompt is really asking

Each of the twelve TOK concepts gives you a different way into a prompt. These are the ones that do the most work here.

• Truth

  Status of Knowledge · primary lens

  Any answer has to say what a candidate for knowledge must get right, which forces a position on whether truth is a requirement or only an aspiration.

  The property a claim has when things are as it says they are. Whether truth is correspondence to a world, coherence within a system, or what enquiry would settle on in the long run is itself contested, and different areas of knowledge lean on different answers.

• Justification

  Grounds of Knowledge

  The classic move is to add justification to true belief, so the prompt cannot be answered without testing whether that addition is enough.

  The reasoning that connects evidence to a conclusion. Two knowers can hold the same evidence and be justified in different beliefs if their inferential standards differ. Justification is what separates knowing something from happening to be right about it.

Where the knowledge framework bites

Reached through this prompt’s concepts, in the framework’s canonical order.

Scope

Truth: Areas of knowledge do not all mean the same thing by a true claim. Mathematical truth is truth within a system of assumptions, historical truth is answerable to surviving evidence, and asking whether a work of art is true requires a different sense of the word altogether.

Justification: The strength of justification a field demands is calibrated to what it is for. A discipline whose errors are expensive sets a higher bar than one where a provisional answer is useful, so justification standards are partly a statement about a field's purpose.

Methods and tools

Truth: Each discipline has procedures for provisionally settling what will be treated as true: proof, replication, corroboration of sources, critical consensus. Studying those procedures is the practical way into the question of what truth is here.

Justification: A discipline's methods encode its standard of justification: peer review, replication, source criticism and proof are all answers to the question of when an inference has earned its conclusion. Comparing those standards across areas of knowledge is more revealing than asking which is strictest.